This message is brought to you by Apple Card.
Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers.
The titanium Apple Card is no different.
It's laser etched, has no numbers and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3 back on everything at Apple.
Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes.
Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch.
Terms and more at applecard.com.
This episode is brought to you by Sierra AI.
No matter the industry, how businesses connect with customers defines their brand.
And today, connection starts with a conversation.
Sierra is the platform for businesses that want to provide better, more human customer experiences with AI.
With Sierra, your AI agent solves problems fast.
No stock answers, no hold music.
Visit Sierra.ai to learn more.
This episode of TED Business is sponsored by Handwritten.
Handwritten helps businesses stand out in a world overflowing with digital messages.
Every day, clients, partners, and prospects are flooded with emails, texts, and LinkedIn messages.
Most are ignored.
But a handwritten note?
That gets opened.
It gets read and it gets remembered.
Handwritten uses advanced robotics to write real pen and ink notes at scale, allowing businesses to send hundreds or even thousands of personalized messages without lifting a pen.
Whether it's thanking customers, celebrating milestones or reaching out to prospects, These notes create genuine human connection that drives loyalty and opens doors.
Top brands and business leaders trust Handwritten to deliver thoughtful, memorable outreach.
For more information, visit handwritten.com slash TED.
That's handwritten, spelled just like it sounds, except with a Y instead of an I.
H-A-N-D-W-R-Y-T-T-E-N.com.
We talk about business a lot on this podcast, but this topic varies quite a bit from person to person.
Business from a healthcare worker, for example, is a different beast than business in retail, and both contexts have different challenges and needs.
So what about the business of being an artist?
For people in creative industries, this concept takes on a whole new meaning.
Financial security can be elusive.
No health benefits.
No retirement plans.
No linear path towards stability.
It's tough.
And many people make it work by having multiple jobs.
But what if there was a way to offer more support?
I'm Madhupe Akinnola.
This is TED Business, a podcast from TED.
Well, Yancey Strickler already reimagined the way artists can fund their work when he co-founded the company Kickstarter.
But now he's here to talk to us about a novel breakthrough idea a new economic structure for creative work.
Then after the talk, I'll tell you why this is relevant, whether or not you're an artist.
But first, a quick break.
And now, Yancey Strickler takes the TED stage.
So if you want to understand how challenging the future could be for creative people, just look at what's happening with musicians right now.
Up until the late 90s, people either listened to music for free on the radio or by buying a physical copy to listen to at home.
But then the internet happened, and now Spotify and other streaming services give us access to an infinite catalog of music.
We don't own anything, but we can rent pretty much all of it.
So people pay less money, which means musicians make less money, but the platforms make a lot of money.
Recently, researchers have discovered a new type of song on Spotify, a ghost song by a ghost artist.
These are unnamed, uncredited musicians who are paid to make music that sounds like what the Spotify algorithm says people want to hear.
In recent years, some of Spotify's most prominent playlists have seen real songs by real artists replaced with ghost songs by ghost artists.
Real songs have to be paid real royalties.
Ghost songs don't.
Something like this dynamic is playing out across every creative industry.
Maximize profits by minimizing creator compensation.
Now add AI, and the ghost artist doesn't even have to be human anymore.
A future of art without artists.
Now, I'm not an expert on AI, but I have spent the last 25 years working as a creative person and making tools for creative people.
I'm the son of a musician and my career began writing about music for Pitchfork and The Village Voice.
I started a tiny record label and I'm one of the co-founders of Kickstarter, which gave creative people a way to bypass the gatekeepers and go straight to the public with their projects.
Before Kickstarter, so many amazing projects had no chance to exist because they didn't fit some pre-existing business model.
After Kickstarter, millions of people have exchanged billions of dollars in support of new ideas.
Where there was a wall, we built a door.
But despite what you hear about the creator economy, the reality for most creative people is stark.
It's estimated that 85 percent of visual artists make less than 25000 a year and that just 13 percent of creative people earn a full-time living from their work.
So we're not talking about aristocrats and rock stars.
We're talking about people working hard, trying to make a living by doing what comes natural to them.
A musician, a craftsperson, a community theater director, a potter.
Millions of people who are our friends, our family, our neighbors, who inspire us, and millions more people too.
But despite being so central to how we experience life, we don't make things easy for these folks.
There's no automatic health care.
There's no retirement benefits.
There's no path to collective wealth at all.
They're entirely on their own.
In a world of global capitalism, creative people operate like 18th-century traveling peddlers, moving from village to village and project to project, trying to piece together a living.
So there's something missing here a way for creative people to get access to the basics and be a part of something bigger than just them on their own.
And I personally really struggled with this a few years ago.
I was grinding away in the creator economy and getting lonelier by the second.
The people most like me were my biggest competition.
It left me constantly on edge and burnt out and alone.
Eventually I got so frustrated I started a new project to help creative people release work together.
It's called MetaLabel.
And one of the first releases was by myself and 10 other writers who'd all independently written about the same subject.
So I reached out to these people who I didn't know and I proposed a way that we would work together.
We would publish our pieces together in a book and the initial sales would go back to paying the cost of making it.
After that, 70 of the profits would be split equally among us and 30 would go into a shared treasury that we could use for a future project, if things went well.
Everyone agreed, and we became the Dark Forest Collective.
And now, a year later, we've sold 2,000 copies of this book.
More than $70,000 has automatically flowed through our arrangement.
And just now, we published our second book by another author, even better than the first.
And our little collective is going to make six figures, which is wild.
But then I realized it was kind of silly to be so legally YOLO about this, and so I should create some sort of structure to represent what we were doing.
And I was surprised to find there wasn't an obvious fit.
We could be an LLC, but that just puts a shield over the project.
It doesn't help you grow the pie or share it.
We could be a C corporation, but then you're taxed twice and you have all sorts of overhead.
You could be a nonprofit and then be wrapped in red tape.
So I started thinking, what if you could create a new structure for a project like ours?
So I reached out to a trusted colleague and soon we were speaking to experts in making new corporate forms.
And for the last year, a small team of us have been working together, digging into this question.
And I'm here representing our work because we've come up with something.
A new structure for creative work.
We call it the Artist Corporation, or A Corp.
Now I realize that a new corporate structure sounds like the last thing creative people need and that these two words are the exact opposite of each other.
Take the lead and adapt to whatever comes your way.
And when you're that driven, you drive an equally determined vehicle, the Range Rover Sport.
Lending power, poise and performance, like you, it was designed to make an impact.
The vehicle combines dynamic, sporting personality, elegance and agility to deliver a truly instinctive drive.
Defining true modern luxury.
It includes the latest innovations in comfort and convenience, with features like the cabin air purification system, alongside active noise cancellation, for all new levels of quality, comfort and control.
A force inside and out.
The Range Rover Sport was created with a choice of powerful engines, including a plug-in hybrid with an estimated range of 53 miles.
Build your Range Rover Sport at rangerover.com slash US slash sport.
This episode is sponsored by Bolin Branch.
Here's something I've learned about quality.
You don't always need to look at the fancy specs to recognize it.
Take thread count, for instance.
Everyone thinks higher numbers mean better sheets, but that's actually a myth.
Thread count just measures fabric density, not quality.
What really matters is the quality of those threads.
That's why I love my bowl and branch sheets.
They use the finest 100 organic cotton in a breathable, durable weave that you can feel the moment you touch them.
The first night I slept on them, I immediately noticed the difference.
They're silky smooth, incredibly soft yet cooling, perfect for these warmer nights.
But here's what really impressed me.
They actually get softer with every wash.
After months of use, they feel even more luxurious than when I first got them.
That's the kind of long-lasting quality I value.
Plus, they come with a 30-night worry-free guarantee, so you can try them risk-free.
Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl & Branch.
Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com slash tedbusiness.
That's bowlandbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com.
But the A Corp just might be the door that opens up a new path to prosperity for creative people.
You can think of an A Corp as like a company, but built for how creative people work.
And we can imagine a band starts and right from the beginning, they have an A Corp.
So not just five individuals.
They're people who collectively own an organization that has the power to own their intellectual property, their gear, their business.
As they start to get paid.
That money can automatically flow to each of the members according to preset amounts, and they could even set aside money to be saved for future projects in a treasury or pulling together with other artist corporations to get better health care or other benefits.
As an artist corporation, they would also be able to receive both commercial revenue as well as nonprofit sources of funding.
And if a label or a bigger commercial entity came along, rather than just selling the rights to their intellectual property, which has been customary until now, as an artist corporation they can issue shares.
So instead, that entity would make an investment in the artist corporation, allowing it to be valued more highly and everyone to benefit if things went well.
Now, these are simple things for many businesses to do, but they're very hard for creative people to do.
But artist corporations will take these same capabilities and put them in the hands of the entire creative community.
And creative people are already leaders and entrepreneurs, we just don't think of them that way.
The painter Mike Kelly once said I started out an anarchist and a hippie and now I'm an entrepreneur with 15 employees.
Look at Tyler, the creator, teenage hip-hop phenom turned fashion impresario and now world builder.
Or Dolly Parton, who turned her incredible talent and fame into a whole world of businesses and even a theme park that celebrates where she comes from in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
Now, these are people at the top of their game who use their agency to take these bigger risks.
But what if you didn't have to be in the 1% to get that chance?
What if these sort of tools and self-determination were part of every artist's kit?
So this is not a government handout.
This is not a charity.
This is not a special favor.
This is the exact opposite.
Right now, creative people are excluded from the full benefits of capitalism.
Artist corporations will treat them as real economic actors for the first time.
Creating a consistent structure for how we value creative work is going to cause a revolution in how these industries operate, and it's going to bring more money into space than we've ever seen before.
A lot of it coming from fans who just want to support the world they want to see and won't be looking for a big financial return.
Other people will, and I fully expect venture capital for artists and creators to become a real thing.
And, to be honest, this is where I start to get nervous.
But then I remember the way things are now and that in the past artists have had to answer to the church, the kings, the aristocracy, wealthy patrons, network executives, now corporate algorithms.
But artist corporations finally give us our own seat at the table.
To make this a reality.
We're following an established path for making new corporate forms, and we have people on our team who have successfully done this before.
A lot of this work will be happening in public, building a coalition of artists creators fans investors, politicians all people who believe that artist corporations are a good thing for everybody.
Because this isn't anti-tech, this isn't anti-AI.
This is about what type of world we want to live in.
One where we rent access to corporate-controlled AI-generated platforms, or one where our creative and cultural institutions are owned by the people who made them.
If we keep artists powerless, the options are just going to get more and more limited.
But if we allow them to be more than just individuals, whole new possibilities await.
The next Disney won't be started by AI or some traditional company.
It'll start as an artist corporation, a creative vision brought to life by a person or group of people that changes how the rest of us see the world.
Artists don't need pity, artists need power.
And together, we're going to build it.
Thank you.
Did I talk too much?
Why can't I just let it go?
Take a breath.
You're not alone.
Let's talk about what's going on.
Counseling helps you sort through the noise with qualified professionals, and online therapy makes it convenient.
See if it's for you.
Visit betterhelpcom slash random podcast for 10 off your first month of online therapy and let life feel better.
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet, with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.
Just ask the Capital One bank guy.
It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.
He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.
Ah, really?
Thanks, Capital One bank guy.
What's in your wallet?
Terms apply.
See CapitalOne.com slash bank.
Capital One N.A. member FDIC.
This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe.
With Wise, you can send, spend and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps and save up to 55 compared to major banks.
Plus, Wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer.
Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos in Puerto Vallarta or sending euros to a loved one in Paris, you know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups.
Be smart.
Join the 15 million customers who choose WISE.
Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com.
Learn more by visiting WISE.com slash US slash compare.
T's and C's apply.
That was Yancey Strickler speaking at TED 2025.
I love how Yancey gives artists so much cred.
There's often the stereotype that creative folks are pie-in-the-sky dreamers with no business sense.
But because artists are so often shut out of regular financial incentives and institutions, many of them have had to become business leaders and entrepreneurs on their own.
So why don't we trust them more when they tell us that the system isn't working for them, especially with AI threatening their work opportunities and a lack of government funding impacting their livelihoods?
Yancey shows us that the business of creative work doesn't have to be lonely.
It can be collective and collaborative, especially if we can imagine new ways of profit sharing and trust artists to determine what tools they need to build a more sustainable path.
Because one thing is certain, no one wants to live in a world full of algorithmically generated art.
That's it for today.
TED Business is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced by Hannah Kingsley Ma, edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact-checked by Julia Dickerson.
Special thanks to Maria Ladias, Farah DeGrange, Daniela Balarezo, Tansika Sangmanivang and Roxanne Heilash.
I'm Madhupe Akinola.
Thanks for listening.
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet, with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.
Just ask the Capital One bank guy.
It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.
He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.
Ah, really?
Thanks, Capital One bank guy.
What's in your wallet?
Terms apply.
See CapitalOne.com slash bank.
Capital One N.A. member FDIC.
Now you can fly anywhere in the world and pay discount prices on your airline tickets.
Book a flight today to London Paris, Madrid or anywhere else you want to go and pay a lot less guaranteed.
Call the International Travel Department right now at Low Cost Airlines.
800-215-5141 800-215-5141 That's 800-215-5141
